Podcast

Transcript

John Goodwin (00:06): Hello, and welcome to the Writers and Illustrators of the Future Podcast. This is John Goodwin, your host. This podcast is dedicated to the aspiring writer and artist and will provide inspiration and tips from top professionals in the field. If you’ve been listening to this podcast or are new to it, I thank you very much. I would also appreciate if you took a moment to follow it on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts. Writers of the Future is one the longest running writing competitions in the world, now celebrating over four decades of providing a helping hand as initially conceived by L. Ron Hubbard.

I’m here today with Owen Cotter. Owen is a radio host, producer, and on-camera presenter. He has appeared in major media such as ESPN, VH1, Sirius XM, Real Scene TV, William Shatner’s My Outer Space TV, as well as the Michael J. Fox Foundation, Sony Darkstar Universal Music Group, and Heavy. We met each other not that long ago at this really nice restaurant in Glendale, California. That is, our mutual friend who isn’t an SF&F geek, knew that we both were, and were likely to hit it off, which bore itself out to be true. While many of us enjoy being able to read SF&F and then go back to our real world, you get to live your life as an SF&F nerd. So with that, welcome Owen.

Owen Cotter (01:25): Thank you so much, John, for having me on the show today, man. I appreciate you. That was a great intro, man. That was awesome.

John Goodwin (01:30): So how’d you pull this off? Like you’re like one of those dream lives you just get all kinds of stuff about SF&F, but then you travel around and you live the world of SF&F. So how’d you pull that off as an SF nerd?

Owen Cotter (01:45): Great question John. So I’ve been doing this for since I was a kid. I was growing up on science fiction. The sci-fiction site back here I acquired around 2008 slash 9 which went live officially around 2000. We had some iterations originally gonna do some social interface. We went live around 2010 and it’s gone in different formats. The new updated version launched about… This year’s five years. So five-year mission number one of the new mission started going on but I acquired this originally, it was a platform that was a literary platform, which is the Hugo Nebula Award winning literature, literary magazine section of Sci-Fi Channel. And they had a back deal with the site. And when they rebranded as SYFY, I acquired the site and started redeveloping into Global Information Portal, media news publishing company for science fiction and beyond.

John Goodwin (02:38): Do you still have all the original stuff on there from the Hugos and Nebulas and whatnot?

Owen Cotter (02:43): We do not. would love to port that over. That is in archives. I believe it’s still live in the sci-fi on what you call way back machine or time back machine. That is a good question. Love to find a way to get that on there. And I don’t know if they have the rights from the authors or not, but it originally was published in the OG, believe Ellen Datlow was the one from Omni Magazine was the original editor of that. I’ll maybe reach out to her. Maybe there’s someone knows her. That’d be interesting to do that. Yeah.

John Goodwin (03:13): Yeah, ’cause I mean I’m gonna be inviting you to WorldCon. I’m helping handle the press room, the media for WorldCon, so I wanna set you up with whoever you want to interview. Maybe somebody there can, that’s in I think it’s Anaheim.

Owen Cotter (03:25): Awesome.

Okay, cool.

John Goodwin (03:29): It’s here in the greater LA area, so we’ll be able to get there and we can have another dinner and Emily and I can have a chat with you and you and Mars again for another fun dinner somewhere. And this time it’s our turn to treat. So anyway, moving on. So you got SF, you got science fiction and fantasy. So now how’d you end up

formatting your SciFiction.com with what you’re doing? Like was this a dream or is this something that’s kinda like evolved but once you saw this availability, like did it just land into your lap this website or how’d this come about?

Owen Cotter (04:13): That’s a good question. So before we had the site, I was experimenting. I wanted to do, cause kind of had blogs came out, right? Around like early 2000s, before like Facebook and Twitter, they had like everything from MySpace or early days, dating myself a little bit, but they had early social infrastructure. And I wanted to create something that was viable to the science fiction fan base, because I was always a fan of sci-fi and fantasy and animation and all the goodies that encompass the world of pop culture and everything.

So I wanted to develop something that was, I had a portal originally to something like a social network, but then of course, Facebook came out and they really had that. But I wanted to create something that viable things and podcasts started getting really popular around 2000. And of course, that yourself. So I’m like, I told a buddy of mine said, well, you need to get into podcasting. I bet you’d be great at this. And so I interviewed, first few years, like a few hundred people. After year one, it was sort of getting really ramped up. And I just started finding agents and managers and actors and Comic Book illustrators and people doing fan films, I cold email them. And about eight out of every 10 people would say yes, and they come on the show. And over that period of time, we did a few hundred audio interviews in that first few years. And then for maybe 2012, I started breaking out the on-camera stuff, the various events and things. And then of course, live streams at the big jam. So my wife, Marz, like, you got to get the live streams. We’ve been that for about six years now on and off and then we do all this. So we’ve got about 2000 plus interviews in various formats ranging from short form to hour long and beyond. So an on-camera video as well. And then that’s the podcast and videos. We also have an international team of writers that write like all day long on different things and submit and post articles, everything ranging from fantasy, video games, sci-fi, anime, cyberpunk, space. We got a new one called artificial intelligence about anything doing with technology.

Anything you can imagine that’s in there. Literary, there’s a book section on there, there’s what you just created some new stuff for literary things and the whole database spans dozens of categories, spanning all the sub-genres of everything.

John Goodwin (06:21): Yeah, I mean it’s amazing what you’ve created here, but is this an Owen baby or is this an Owen slash Mars baby or like how’s it, ’cause that’s a lot of moving parts.

Owen Cotter (06:36): It’s now become both because I’ve been doing it so long. Me and Mars has only been married for one year, but we’ve known each other for five. So she’s kind of stepped in over the last five to get the new revamp and design the new logo and all that put together. Everything else before that, I was conducting interviews way before we met. It’s been a lot of work without getting too deep into it. The site was restructured around 2020, 21 of the new design, all the new systems kicked online. We made it more wide range covering more topics. if you look at the site, there’s things like retro gaming, portable games, anime. Once we lit up the anime section, it just went crazy. We got like seven writers writing about anime all week long on that. Comics, graphic novels and comic books, as well as other sub genres ranging from cyberpunk, diesel punk, steampunk, fantasy, sci-fi, superheroes. We cover superhero stuff as well. It’s just anything and everything.

It’s anything that we can cover. We don’t do really much horror, heavy horror. We do stuff like aliens and predator and stuff like that, space stuff and creatures in space, on a spaceship.

John Goodwin (07:48): So how’d you run across SciFiction.com as an available sight, or was that something that would fit in with your game plan?

Owen Cotter (08:03): That’s a good question. So, when the site popped up, they were rebranding SYFY as their new brand. For availability, me and a former business associate noticed that it was up available and it was offered for a price. We negotiated, we got the price and we bought it. And then when I was like saying, well, we need to develop this into something viable. I wanted to do a sci-fi channel, but of course they already had that. Like maybe internet, the social media channel. YouTube was always a big go to.

The problem with YouTube is the terrain’s changed. You can’t get any traffic on there without… You had to have started a decade or 15 years before that plugged in. Because if you look at all the YouTube channels, they have a million followers. They started back 15, 20 years ago. So I got a little late on that. But we developed all the other social channels predominantly, which is interesting, when we first lit the channel in the original site format up in 2010, it was originally hosted on the old legacy platform David Karp created called Tumblr, which has now been bought by WordPress. And Tumblr liked it so much that Karp’s people wrote me and said, Hey, we love what you’re doing. Did a full staff write-up in a blog going over me and the history of the site and all that. And featured in trending and recommended, which immediately that blew up pretty big. Tens of thousands of subscribers poured in over that first year or two. And then once we had the first iteration of the site kind of put together when it was our experimental social platform before we

transition over. That went from that to that, then stepping stones and earlier sight a version of this to what we see now.

John Goodwin (09:37): ’cause Tumblr was a blog site. A blog social site. So when you first started then you were basically a blog that you then grew from there. I get it. All right, so now in doing the whole thing with social media and with what you’re doing here, I’m going like so what’s the actual purpose of scifiction.com?

Owen Cotter (10:00): That’s a very good question. The purpose is to do some trending, all the trending news, everything we can do to promote positive content, but beyond that, anything that is inspirational and anything that covers all the cool stuff that everybody likes, from robots, alien spaceships, fantasy sword fights with knights versus dragons, anything that’s super cool, conceptualized using the lens of science fiction to promote and imagine universes that we have not seen. What ifs?

Imagine greater, like sci-fi always says imagine beyond the normal everyday life and something like these times. Everybody always struggles if they want to go and escape to sci-fi, we’ve got it on the site. They don’t like that. They got other channels, but we like to promote things that make you think.   creative things like a lot of our writers talk about   what? We kind of let them, as long as it’s positive, we let them go free-range go do whatever they can do to talk about all the insider stuff. On movie covers, we send people out.

Just got one of our contributors, Kieran, was at the UK premiere of The Mandalorian and Grogu. We absolutely loved it. Reviews on the front of the site now. Try not to do too much spoilers if we can. The next thing we got coming up is, beyond going out of the country, we’re doing some stuff on a big collector event out in Nashville. My buddy runs one of the largest sci-fi collector expos in the country. And he has a lot of the big actors like from Star Wars, Tron, Bruce Boxleitner will be there. My buddy and client will be there.

He created like the Dark Legacy franchise with other surviving cast of Babylon 5. We have a lot of things we do. Now we’re actually branching out the film and television production. So a lot of stuff we’re doing now is help promote various television projects and original IP that we’re working on as well as just permeating through anything and everything we can. Like your award ceremony, as well as Worldcon, Saturn Awards, big events, San Diego Comic Con, all the global footprint. And what we can’t cover, we send our correspondents out to Tokyo or London.

London Comic Con, we got one coming up on that one as well.

John Goodwin (11:56): Wow, so you’re gonna be going to San Diego Comic Con?

Owen Cotter (11:58): We’ll be at San Diego.

John Goodwin (12:00): So I will see you there then. We can have lunch or dinner. I’ve got a friend Jeff Berkwitz, I don’t know if   him or not, he used to be an editor who wrote for scifi.com.

Owen Cotter (12:14): Yes, okay thank you.

John Goodwin (12:17): Yeah, he lives in San Diego. So I’m connecting up with him for lunch. And definitely good guy.

Owen Cotter (12:24): I gotta introduce to some of my buddies down there. We’re gonna be doing some panels. Are you doing any program as well?

John Goodwin (12:29): No, I’ve never gotten past like just maintaining our booth there. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to. I just haven’t moved in that direction. I do panels in when I go to DragonCon and go to FanX Salt Lake. But I’ve not done in if there’s a panel that needs somebody, another person that can talk about like what I do, then I’d love to do that.

Owen Cotter (12:50.222)

Bring you on out easy, I’ve buddies that work liaison.

John Goodwin (12:55): I’d love to be on the panel there with you, ’cause the thing that I like the most ’cause we share this common reality of inspiration and being positive and the good things, that you can celebrate. It’s there’s so much of the opposite out there and even when you venture onto social media, you’re taking your career and your life into your own hands to, well, for the haters to come in or for the cancel culture or whatever else is gonna go on that to kinda like chop at you.

And I mean I’ve gone through that curve and so I’m fine and but I keep things really straight on point with writer creativity, supporting writers, supporting artists. I don’t have on my social media I take no sides in terms of politics or on religion, it’s just straight we support the creatives.

, so that that holds up pretty good. And that’s something that I really admire about what you do too, is like you just for sure you want to be able to support and do that. So I found that interestingly enough, my podcast continues to grow quite satisfactorily because that’s all I do. I don’t, I just I have all types of guests on like as do you.

And we just go into like how’d you make it happen? What were you doing? What tips do you have for others? What’s your personal journey so that people can kinda like, wow, that’s how they started? ‘Cause people don’t only think of their heroes or the favorite actors top of their pinnacle at the roles that they know as. They don’t know that when they first started, the other job they’re working 60 hours a week was as a waiter at the local Denny’s or that type of thing.

Owen Cotter (14:34): The big job from the bottom to the top to get to where they were now at the pinnacle.

John Goodwin (14:54): It’s like this overnight success only took them ten years, only took them fifteen years.

Owen Cotter (15:00.28): There’s like a galactic formula of like 20 to 30 years to be successful in some 15, 20 years is what I was told, something like that.

John Goodwin (15:07): It definitely takes a long time to become that overnight success. And there’s sometimes fate is very fickle in how it actually hands out success to you so it’s really that’s what I like doing about this, is like people can find out, wow, that’s how they started? That’s like me and then maybe there is hope for me, which I really like to be able to impart. So you recently attended, you mentioned the Writers and Illustrators of the Future Gala. So tell me about that event, ’cause it was a fun night.

Owen Cotter (15:38): That was a fun night. The food was good too, man. Like you were right. The event was amazing. I liked the variety of people that were presented and all the stories they had. The book’s actually amazing as well. I mean, I just loved the format. You had the awards ceremony after the red carpet. You had everybody to go in there. You had all the legends. Everybody from Kevin J. Anderson to Orson Scott Card to Larry Niven. You name it. All the legends of sci-fi and publishing were there.

The awards were absolutely phenomenal. It’s like I would like to say, would be like the Academy Awards of Literature, Sci-Fi and Art. And that was pretty much what it was in my opinion. So I thought it was absolutely amazing. I love that you had after the ceremony in the lobby, all the winners and all the artists in there to sign the book and mingle and all that. And it was beautiful venue. I’ve been used to _____. That’s the five star. I loved it. I had a blast.

John Goodwin (16:31): Yeah, so it’s been very, very successful for us and the thing with it is as it’s, you called it the Academy Awards for Literature Science Fiction and Fantasy, is that it’s each year we’re challenged how to make the subsequent year better than the previous year. And it’s always it’s always a challenge. How do we do that? What do we do? What about this? What about that? Somehow we end up doing that, we get a lot of, there’s a lot of support to it and a lot of people really enjoy it and we’ve, you saw there we had the red carpet and there’s quite a bit of media there. We had Japanese media, Chinese media, Spanish. We had winners from eight different countries this year that came in and were there at the event. Now you were there you arrived a day or two earlier.

Owen Cotter (17:09): International for all the world.

We got there about a day or two earlier. We went down there. We actually did the Griffith Observatory with the space and all the stuff there. And then we came over to the event after that.

John Goodwin (17:28): Were you able to make it to any of the workshop stuff?

Owen Cotter (17:32): We did the first night with you down there at the meet and greet and dinner. We didn’t get to go to the workshops that we were doing Griffith and we were all tied up that next day. Did some programming and then we came up to the event afterwards. But we did do the first, I loved that first night. It was awesome. That was a beautiful evening.

John Goodwin (17:46): Yeah, was it dinner? Did you and Mars meet our keynote speaker, the astronaut?

Owen Cotter (17:52): Yeah, I a good interview with her. We’re believe it or not, we’re putting together a really cool presentation for y’all, whether y’all know it or not. It’ll be debuting on the site. And we’ve got all the segments. We’ve been working on this documentary that me and my buddy and my client and my good friend out in the islands putting together with the sci-fi. So we’re getting all this explosion of content coming. So stay tuned, fans.

John Goodwin (18:14): So now any particular favorite moments you had during the gala ’cause that some people like we had that night there were over ten million people either watching or listening to the gala.

Owen Cotter (18:28): The intro was pretty cool with the acrobats and the sword things and all that was pretty dope. And then you have the, there’s a lot. I like the one guy who was one of the winners he had the, it was he had a funny, like a really, he was some comedic stuff in those speeches and had beautiful presentations at that. And was like his name and he was awesome. I was a funny little thing was him.

John Goodwin (18:48): Yeah, there was the one guy when he got his gold award, he said, because I go over people like here’s the basic rules of etiquette with respect to speeches, of how to do awards presentations and speeches. So I went over that with them and they worked out what they wanted to say, and I mean these guys are writers and they’re artists, they’re introverts, they’re not used to being outside of their room with their art or their typewriter or their keyboard. So they’re very shy and very insecure and they default to goofy things. So I say these are things that do not work. So don’t try these things. And so they go over it and then I said, I gotta tell everybody, the worst speeches categorically are the grand prize winners. Because you’re gonna say, I didn’t expect it to be me, I didn’t have anything prepared.

And then you just go from there. And so I said, so please just take a moment, just in case you do win, prepare something. So the illustrator winner, Bafu.

Owen Cotter (19:58): That’s him, yeah.

John Goodwin (20:00): That was funny where he came up, “and so I made myself a speech to say, Okay, if you win the award, take it and run before they have a chance to change their mind.” And the audience was just cracking up. But he was just, and for him it was really great too, ’cause he said, I really appreciate this ’cause I learned not to invalidate myself, not to make nothing of myself. I really appreciate I learned that. Well, I really appreciate that.

And it’s true, like a lot of these people, this is their first recognition that what they’re doing isn’t for naught. And that’s an important that we do the and we also celebrate over a thousand writers and artists this year. That’s which is really good.

Owen Cotter (20:42): Big accomplishment. I want to congratulate you again on that. That’s absolutely phenomenal.

John Goodwin (20:46): Yeah, it’s been, I mean obviously 42 years is a lot of years to be doing this stuff. But it’s something that we’re very, very proud of. And we just, the winners they go in and they tell others about it. And so we have a lot of entries now from over 175 countries. We have people entering and then we’ve had so much media this year, and then from what you’ve done and are going to be doing, you’ll have your hundreds of thousands of listeners and viewers.

Like, wow, okay, maybe I can enter this contest ’cause it’s a level playing field.

Owen Cotter (21:20): They should have something they want to do. I would highly recommend it, man. There’s some great winners this year. I like the artworks. Amazing.

Check out the book. It’s good,

John Goodwin (21:27): Right here, this is Writers of the Future volume 42. And it’s just amazing. That’s, its a story, the cover art there was a dragon by one of our judges, Ciruello, who lives in Spain. And then the story that was written against that, because otherwise normally it’s people write a story, then you hire an artist to illustrate it. This is one thing that’s reversed.

Basically we commissioned Ciruello, in this case, but each year we get a different judge that does the cover art. And then we get a writer judge to write a story based on the cover art, just the other way around. So Orson Scott Card wrote this story against the cover this year. So that was a lot of fun. People love Orson Scott Card. He’s the guy that wrote Ender’s game. Super nice.

Owen Cotter (22:17): Legendary. We got to talk to him down there as well. Super cool cat. Didn’t Ciruello work on Aragon, believe as well, for the dragon?

John Goodwin (22:21): Yeah, super cool, yeah.

John Goodwin (22:27): He’s an amazing dragon artist. So yeah, we love to see the careers launch and get started and it’s got such a high success rate. It’s about sixty two percent. We checked two years ago, going back all the years and so that’s we’re pretty excited about that, pretty stoked about that. So just what amazes me is the variation on basic tropes, but then they’re kinda like, how did you think that? It’s just a total crazy new twist of how something can be. And then these, ’cause he’s got these writers and artists aren’t bound by like, okay, I write this type of story. I do this type of art. They’re like they’re at the get-go. They’re at the start of their careers. So they can do whatever they want to do and not be bound by like, no, you write this type of story. So you’ve got to do this.

And so they don’t have that. So they come up with the most amazingly creative type things that they do. Where about any of the judges? Any of the judges that were like, you mentioned Scott Card and Kevin Anderson and Larry Niven.

Owen Cotter (23:39): Kevin Anderson was amazing. I like Orson Scott Card was great. Both those guys. I got to talk to. I had dinner with Orson. Beautiful man. It’s absolutely phenomenal wealth of knowledge to tell me some interesting stuff about his work in Shakespeare back in the day and Kevin J. Anderson was interesting too as we talked to him on the carpet as well about not only his work with Dune, but just his opinions on sci-fi and all the plethora of the award ceremony. One of the cool characters that was down there was a guy named a Neo Edmund.

I didn’t know, I knew his name, but didn’t know he had worked on the Power Rangers novels. I was a big Ranger fan, still am as a kid, even now to this day. Of course, now it’s been sold off, it’s a sub on kind of retired and all that. I thought that was pretty interesting conversation too.

John Goodwin (24:21): I’m talking with him Friday. He’s coming over to the office and we’re doing an interview there with him. I read his first book on Red Riding, his first novel. I read that. And so we’re talking about that. Just the importance of story over [technique], it was his first book and he’s definitely gotten a lot better since then, like he by his own admission. But that story was just so good. So that’s interesting that you met him and it’s just amazing how small the world becomes when you do this.

Owen Cotter (24:49): Very small. I also like the gentleman that won, I believe he’s China, Andy or something like that. He had won one of the awards down there at the event. I talked a little bit in the lobby and he was very happy to be on the interview, and this is beautiful presentation. Whole thing was absolutely amazing.

John Goodwin (25:06): Was he a writer or an artist?

Owen Cotter (25:09): Think he was a writer or maybe artist or I think was a writer.

John Goodwin (25:13): Yeah, well we have Alan Zhang is an artist. He’s artist, he illustrated the story A Ready Made Bubble of Light. So yeah. Haoshin Alan Zhang is his name.

Owen Cotter (25:28): and like talking with the astronaut of course as well. She was there from Norwegian. The first I wish she docked with the ISS and she was the first SpaceX.

John Goodwin (25:43): Yeah, she was a SpaceX commander there. But they’re the first mission that went pole to pole. Normally they go over the circumference and they went pole to pole and it’s so… It’s pretty amazing. She and her story was just amazing too.

Owen Cotter (26:02): The video that you all showed at the ceremony was beautiful.

John Goodwin (26:05): Yeah. She’s such a wonderful person and her husband’s amazing too.

Owen Cotter (26:10): I talked to him for a while. He’s super cool. He actually, I thought for a brief second when he walked up, I thought he was David Guetta, the French DJ, because he kind of looks like him. Was like, whoa, what is he doing here? This is one of my favorite DJs. He was like a legend from back in the day, but he’s a super nice guy. Him and his wife are just beautiful people. We talked to them as well. Probably put them in the montage as well. We got a whole presentation we’re going to put together for you.

John Goodwin (26:33): That’s cool. So now obviously this is a contest created by L. Ron Hubbard. I think when we talked before you said you’re familiar with Hubbard’s science fiction and fantasy. Do you remember reading any of his different books?

Owen Cotter (26:46): Well, I remember the story that you’ll have at the opening dinner that you’ll did the recording at. It’s an original pulp, I believe, from like the 1930s or 40s. It was like 42, 43.

John Goodwin (26:57): Forty-two yes, Space Can.

Owen Cotter (26:59): Yes, that was a man up that was that needs to be on an audio podcast or like an audio drama. That thing was insane. And the guy that was doing the drums, I forget his name, like the that was cool.

John Goodwin (27:11): That was very cool. That and he told the history of how they work and what they do and how they communicate with us. And it was like, wow.

Owen Cotter (27:19): They’re like the finger octaves or something like that talked about how all the instrumental music medley and all.

John Goodwin (27:25): Yeah. And then Jim Meskimen as the voice narrator who did it as a solo narration was just so good.

Owen Cotter (27:31): He’s supposedly done a lot of voice narration work.

John Goodwin (27:34): He has done a lot. Yeah, he’s done a whole lot. He does a hundred, two hundred different voice impressions.

Owen Cotter (27:44): Does he do stuff for television or predominantly audio drama?

John Goodwin (27:48): Television. He’s been on various series. He was one of the first ones that did a lot of the animation voiceovers. He’s done that for years. He’s just an amazing voice talent.

So on the value of speculative fiction, over other genres, what in your estimation makes it so important, so significant as a genre as compared to mystery and romance and stuff like that?

Owen Cotter (28:22): I think it brings about another aspect of, it’s another viewpoint. It’s different from mystery or westerns or thrillers or romance. Of course, there is some of that in, you got sci-fi westerns, military sci-fi romance, space operas like Star Wars. But overall, I think it just allows for just very, very creative storytelling and imagining worlds that have never, may one day exist. I mean, look at Star Trek.

Communicators and engines and different things that maybe in the future we’ll have warp drive and things are coming about where science fiction meets science fact or is it science fiction? don’t know. But bridges the gap between reality and fiction that what could be in the future and maybe beyond that. Or even now at the present where it may be coming closer to reality.

John Goodwin (29:18: Well one of the guests at our awards gate was Robert Hogg. He’s in charge of the mission the Rover.

Owen Cotter (29:27): Mars. One of my guys talked to him about the Europa, I believe it’s the Europa Clipper mission that they’re doing. I thought that was. That’s very cool.

John Goodwin (29:36): But for him, the inspiration was science fiction. That’s what got him all excited about it, like, wow, doing this. And we had a keynote speaker several years ago who was the director of the Ames Research Center for NASA. And for him, he would read science fiction. He said he used to get in trouble because he’d be in school, he’d have his history book, and then inside of it he’d have a pulp fiction inside there, reading that and the teacher would pull him out. What are you reading?

I’m reading the history of our future.

Owen Cotter (30:08): Wow, that’s awesome. That’s cool. He was one of the only ones we didn’t get the interview down there. was one that we sat with a separate table from him. One of my guys sat with him and he was telling me about his conversation about the Europa stuff they’re working on. So I thought it was really interesting.

John Goodwin (30:23): Well we can definitely set up for you to do an interview with him too. He’s really, for a while he also worked in the PR department for JPL. He’s been there for decades. But now he’s the mission manager of that.

Owen Cotter (30:40): I can’t wait to see what they can do in the future. Have you seen that series For All Mankind? It’s like the alternate future thing with Joel Kinnaman. He’s on Apple TV. It takes place from the 60s and profiles like 50, 60 years in the future, but each decade is a different thing. It’s like the space race never ended. So they end up on Mars and the moon and beyond. And I don’t want to spoil it, season five is out, but it’s absolutely a phenomenal series detailing an alternate history of space race which just never stopped.

John Goodwin (31:11): Yeah, there’s I’ve got one guy I interviewed, Alan Snail, who wrote a continuation of if the space race to the moon between that whole Cold War between the United States and Russia that would have continued on and it landed on the moon and they had two different bases and there was still that cold war was still going on and it was very comparable. I had read a book that L. Ron Hubbard wrote called 210,000 Thousand Miles Straight Up, which is the moon. And which is a similar type thing. So that was written sixty years earlier.

Owen Cotter (31:48): Yeah, my grandfather actually worked at Redstone Arsenal, was the top Colonel on Redstone. And a lot of my family heavily involved in NASA, Gemini, and the Apollo missions. My cousin, he’s like 80 now, under Von Braun for Gemini and Apollo. All the Apollo astronauts used to hang out at my granddad’s house with their Corvettes they got for $1. And they come up in there Chaffey, Grissom, and John Glenn and all them, they ride up in there and of course, my grandfather was with them But Virgil passed away in the Apollo 1 fire and those guys.

But my dad actually went to Grissom High School, Huntsville, Alabama from 1973, graduated from that. So it’s a lot of permeation from the NASA and real-life space stuff. Little piece of trivia for the fans of your podcast. When my dad, before he met my mom when he was 17, he was kind of dating the girl whose dad was the head of the Marshall Space Flight Technologies Division for NASA. He walks in the office and says, Hey,

what’s that sitting on the shelf up there? And he hands it and says, hey, this is some kind of laser gizmo that they have. You want to borrow it? He asks if you could borrow it, and he borrowed it. And then one night he gets a knock on the door. It’s the head of Marshall Space Flight Security and their divisional manager. And they want to know, can we have our laser back? I think your son has it. And the only people at the time that had it was that kind of technology was NASA for the US and the Russians were experimenting. What they didn’t know, is he reverse engineered three prototypes. Think one was sitting in one of the schools for years or something like that in museums. I thought it was pretty cool, man. It went to state science fair in New York.

John Goodwin (33:17): You definitely have sci fi geek then in your blood. It’s just permeating through your hair follicles and through your eyes and everything. Everywhere.

So the one thing I really like about speculative fiction too, ’cause I’m I don’t get that much time to watch TV or watch movies ’cause I’m always reading the next book for my podcast. And so I find that science fiction and fantasy both provide a platform you can talk about social issues that you can’t talk about for what it is right now, but you can if you put it into another planet, another world, another time zone, different races, then you can talk about things and you can address societal inequalities or frailties or political systems which don’t work, or different types of things in an environment where you can do that and you’ve got like you have a safe space to deal with that.

Owen Cotter (34:17): That’s what Gene Roddenberry did with Star Trek. He used this lens of science fiction, the wagon trains of the stars that tell a positive storytelling, creative storytelling at that.

John Goodwin (34:25): That’s the whole thing, they were able to do that and a lot of science fiction that you see, I know we’ll get into that, and you can, and people that are discerning can look I see what they’re doing there but others, it’s just “I like the story.” “It’s a cool story.”

Owen Cotter (34:44): It’s always fun.

John Goodwin (34:47): One thing that L. Ron Hubbard took advantage of science fiction for was for satire and he said that it’s a really good tool that you can then use to satire all the crazy things. Like there’s one series that he wrote called Mission Earth, which is the last series that he wrote. It was a 1.2 million words broken into ten books, and it’s a satire and it’s Earth from the viewpoint of an alien who looks like humans and they get into speculate how that came to be. But they come here and his job, Mission Earth, is a mission to keep Earth from destroying itself. Because you’ve got the pollution, it burns fossil fuels which is destroying the air, it’s the pollution of the water, all that’s being done there. The shyster lawyers, the corrupt public relations, the criminal, just the various things in the head of…, it’s the whole thing just pointing out the frailties and foibles of planet Earth, which when he wrote it in 1982 was like science fiction. You look at it now, it’s more like a documentary of planet Earth. Just like this is when you start, surreal.

Owen Cotter (36:05): That’s like, reminds me of like that year 82, by the way, really rings a big echo for all the ripple effect for science fiction. You have movies like Tron, which envision like the digital metaverse. You have Blade Runner that envision like futuristic societies and pollution about that Blade Runner’s acid rain. Everybody’s with umbrellas and fog and all this pollution. You had stuff like Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan.

They got a Spock, if you haven’t seen it, go see it. But if you haven’t, don’t spoil it. The Spock dies and he comes back in Search for Spock. He had a lot of stuff coming out. 84, of course, was The Last Star Fighter. But that 80s, early 82 was one of the biggest years for sci-fi.

John Goodwin (36:45): And it’s really cool that it gets you thinking outside a very small box. And also I think one thing that’s really good for especially the pulp fiction is it was escapist literature too. It was like that was in the it was also the….

Owen Cotter (37:05): depression to some of that stuff.

John Goodwin (37:08): I was just gonna say, like during that time period, you had World War One had just finished, and then you had the crash of the stock market and you had the depression. So half America was out of work, the other half were like, or a good portion of that were like worried about being able to keep their job and to keep it going there. And then you had the thrummings of World War Two as it was developing and escalating. And so people were very afraid.

So having something that within the first one or two sentences you’re in a new world, you’re at least for an hour you can be transported to something else, whether you like science fiction, fantasy, adventure, mystery, westerns, whatever it was, it’s something that would take you away. And Pulp Fiction was a very specific type of writing that instantaneously pulled you out. You don’t have the fifty pages, hundred pages like a novel to get to set up the story. You’re just right there.

Owen Cotter (38:04): Yeah, like original stuff like The Shadow which was like a prototype Batman the Phantom Lone Ranger. There’s tons of stuff in there that even now is still popular. I was kind of the Alec Baldwin film was good for The Shadow but the original pulp era like audio dramas too, you had like Space Patrol or that was a TV series that space something space. You had Buck Rogers and the original Flash Gordon radio serials and the audio and video serials with Buster Crabb. He was an Olympic medal winner

John Goodwin (38:36): Yeah, it’s fun because I’ve met various people and I’m good friends with the CEO of ERB, Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. And he’s got his studio, his office over there is in Tarzana and Tarzana is a community that started off, that was Edgar’s that was his whole property.

Owen Cotter (39:00): All right.

John Goodwin (39:04): And they sold it down and turned it to Tarzana. But Tarzana was named after his principal character, Tarzan. But there’s one part of the property there is still the original from when Edgar Rice Burroughs would ride his horse down to his office that they still have there. All the original, the small area there has the original trees and there was that building there. Everything else around it has been sold and is now modern environment.

Modern construction, except that one space which was the original office of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It’s definitely pretty cool and just…

Owen Cotter (39:43): Plus he did John Carter of Mars, which there was a gentleman, there was a movie they made with Disney, but there was a gentleman that was working on his own film in the nineties that they got some early concept, CGI and some things. Thought that would have been amazing. It was kind of around that same timeframe. They did Sky Captain in the World of Tomorrow, which took years to do. was more like a, alternate future. She called it like a diesel or steam punk or something like that one. But around that time, they were working on a proto

version of, there’s actually a trailer for this. A crude trailer that they do some of the experimental stuff it’s on YouTube. But if they had done that, I think that would have been a very big hit for a, or something modern, but it expands more than one film. You’ve got John Carter on Mars you’ve got Princess of [Mars], all the different books that came out of that universe which is basically a pre-Star Wars space opera that he’s always like a Civil War commander, captain or something like that that transfers over to Mars.

John Goodwin (40:42): Yeah, well Lucas said he got a lot of his stuff from Pulp Fiction from that earlier period.

Owen Cotter (40:46): The title sequence from Forbidden Planet with the scrolling text. Because he couldn’t make Flash Gordon. He originally wanted to make Flash Gordon. And they wouldn’t let him have it.

John Goodwin (40:57): He Yeah, I got lots of stuff. He he’s totally free to say, Yeah, I that was my inspiration.

Owen Cotter (41:02): But the Force stuff was pretty interesting. That was a Joseph Campbell mythology, like the Arthur, King Arthur legacy. The sword was kind of the lightsaber, you know, was like the end the lightsaber. But the mythology of the hero’s journey, the journey from have a person that’s an ordinary person. Somebody I’ve never known, somebody worked in the Denny’s is now big. So you come out.

From the origin stories of like Luke Skywalker to saving the Galaxy, blowing up the Death Star and becoming a Jedi master, trained under Yoda and Obi-Wan, that premise of the hero’s journey applies, in my opinion, to a lot of people’s lives and many people at that.

John Goodwin (41:45): Yeah, well I’ve had Roger Christian as a guest a few times on my podcast. He is the creator of the lightsaber. And he talked about how, it was a really funny interview talking about how he actually did that. How he came up with the lightsaber and his briefing by Lucas. So like, I need this. I don’t want to be all flashy new stuff like so much of the science fiction the spaceships were all new and shiny and I don’t want that. I want…

Owen Cotter (41:49): A used universe or something like that.

John Goodwin (42:14): Yeah, that’s what he wanted. So that’s how he did the whole thing with Millennium Falcon, how he created that. And then where he was looking around to be able to get the lightsaber. It was just amazing what he did on that stuff.

Owen Cotter (42:25): Do you know if it’s true that the design of the Falcon was basically a burger that they took a bite out of and pinned the pickle on the top? Was that where the development of the Falcon came from or is that mythology?

John Goodwin (42:36): Well, if it’s true, I don’t know that story.

Owen Cotter (42:39): The medical frigate is basically designed roughly of, I think of an off-board motor on the back of a boat that you drive on the back of like a motor boat. And some of those, supposedly the Boba Fett slave one for what I remember was based off of a light or something that was outside one of the buildings or somewhere on the street, some kind of weird light that they made into the ship design and all that stuff. Cause I remember the original Millennium Falcon was not what we look like today.

It homage kind of the stuff from almost like it was too similar to Space 1999 that Jerry Anderson did. So they flipped it over into this new round design with the Falcon and all that.

John Goodwin (43:15): It’s the history stuff is pretty cool how this all this creatives. It’s just really, really good on that.

So now going back to again the value of speculative fiction. So this is Writers and Illustrators of the Future Podcast and the purpose is to provide inspiration and tips from top professionals in the field. So for yourself, the various what you’ve observed as some of the stumbling blocks you’ve seen people like succumb to, and, but for yourself like tips of how to be able to, like you created a blog, you’ve created this whole site here. So for yourself, what are some tips of how you overcame any blocks and barriers and still went on to create what you’ve created.

Owen Cotter (44:10): Well, you gotta as Luke Skywalker and they said, stay on target, stay on target. And they got it going until the Death Star. Got to keep moving forward no matter what. I would say my words of wisdom would be whatever comes about if you have a goal, first off, set a goal. So Luke pressed to blow up the Death Star and save the day and move on. Set a goal first, move forward to that goal. Also, one thing I would say is when you meet people along the way network with them, if you feel they’re good fit.

Become friends with them or network or bring them into your ecosystem or have them collaborate with you. I’d also say now at this digital age, things have changed since back in the day with like, TV and stuff. It’s all digital. So everything’s streaming, social media. And I would utilize the tools if you’re going to build something like what I’ve built, utilizing the best of your ability to focus on getting the fandom and including them as a community. Cause that’s in the end game that always what the social network is, is a community standpoint where it builds community.

The algorithmic structure can be, if you’re consistent with your content and promoting it and research how to do that, can get permeation through the timeframes and draw in fans. Also, you have to provide something of quality that inspires people, like it’s not really about what you like, it’s about what people like and what they enjoy and if they enjoy it enough. And if you like it the same as they like, even better. You like the same thing they do. I would say for moving forward with people that want to take their stuff to the next level I’d just say, keep working on it. Keep perfecting your craft. When I started doing podcasts, they were early on. I would perfect my craft. Like if you’re looking at a journalist on CNN and they’re talking like, they’re not talking sloppy. Like today in Bosnia, keep reciting that or whatever you need to in the mirror. And so it’s like today in Bosnia, the troops landed on whatever they are. So you keep going forward, perfecting your craft, being consistent creating quality content and evolving it and then getting better quality. But we like to do it, so I’m fiction is not just to get lots of content. We like to find interesting stuff in quality content with the biggest names. Also, we like to do the little guy too. People that are doing fan films, indie production, indie creators, anything and everything, anything that encompasses everything that is beyond our realm in the future. Visiting a positive future is our slogan. So I mean, that’s the gist of what I would say, advice-wise.

John Goodwin (46:32): Okay. You’d mentioned fandom. Do you do much with conventions?

Owen Cotter (46:38): Yes, we do a lot of conventions. We predominantly, I’ve been doing conventions for, since I was a kid, for predominantly covering them for like 15 years. We’ve done every single one that we can do in the US especially everything from San Diego Comic Con, all the big like Comic Con San Diego, Fan Expo, the original Wizard World stuff. We’ve done a little bit of everything all over the US starting to branch out and the stuff. We did Star Wars Celebration, the Star Trek STLV events in Vegas as well as anything pretty much permeates through any juncture point. And John of course your event hopefully do the WorldCon as well we’d love to do that. Internationally wise we’ve done London Comic Con, is coming up. We’ve got one of our correspondents doing that last year or so ago we sent one to Tokyo Japan for Star Wars Celebration. Anything and everything. We love it. It’s a blast.

John Goodwin (47:28): Yeah, do you know Jeffrey Morris?

Owen Cotter (47:33): That name does sound familiar. Is he the guy that did the Space 1999 documentary? [Yes] We’ve had him on the show. It’s amazing.

John Goodwin (47:38): Yeah, I went to his, he had a little premiere here in Los Angeles. He invited me to it. He came to our gala a few years ago. Kevin Anderson brought him. Very nice. And ’cause Kevin was a guest, he was one of the people on that.

Owen Cotter (47:52): That was a fun chat with him. That was actually, speaking of Space 1999, we had one of the original actors on one of the pilots from Space 1999 on the show recently. He’s the narrator of a new project called Helios, which is an audio drama. And that thing’s got a lot of the Star Trek actors as well, Connor Trenier, Anthony Montgomery from Enterprise, who piloted the ship under Archer. Scott Backfus’ character is the main actor in that. As well as a new actress. I think they may do more of that. So stay tuned for that if you’re listening to this.

Probably are, you’ve got a lot of listeners from what it sounds like.

John Goodwin (48:32): Yes. So now with like what you were talking about when we first started seeing you had your five-year target. ]So that was my first five years.] So what’s your next five-year goal that you’ve got?

Owen Cotter (48:44): That is a very good question. I don’t think anybody’s asked me that question. That’s a very good question. The next five years, I see would be branching into more territories we haven’t gone into. So things like original IP, television coverage, development of film properties. We announced a few weeks ago, about a month ago, that we’re going to be doing some new projects. One is a near future military thriller sci-fi of sorts set about five, 10 years in the future. My buddy and client Chris McCauley is writing that. It’s called Ghost Protocol. It takes place in the future, not too far from now that deals with things like anything from AI to tactical team set in the future. So they go into different scenarios and they have to save the day. The other one, we don’t know much about it, but we’re doing that. Actually doing Dracula based on the original 110 missing pages of 1897 novel by Bram Stoker. We’re doing a Dracula movie and some Dracula product tie-ins with 110 missing pages.

That’s what the, if you read the book, it’s got some inconsistencies. Well, there’s characters and things nobody’s ever heard or seen them. So we’re to be doing that next. Then Ghost Protocol. There’s a fantasy project that Del Baris has that my buddy’s working on over, bring him in.

John Goodwin (49:55): You got Tom Cruise coming back in?

Owen Cotter (49:58): Nothing to do with that Ghost Protocol, but his name goes for it. I’ll just convince just Ghost Protocol, not Mission Impossible. Hey, if he wants to be in the film, I’m all for it man. He can be a character, commander I don’t care. It’d be cool. But there’s that fantasy project. We’ve got some also young adult stuff that my buddies working on we got, called Nexus Astrium, which is about mechs and big robots that walk. And there’s a lot of things we’re working original IP wise but for sci-fiction beyond that, we just want to continue bringing quality content, all the permeating through all the different ecospheres of every sub-genre from cyberpunk to sci-fi and beyond.

And video games. Video games too. We love video games.

John Goodwin (50:40): Yeah. So where do you see with everything with AI and with generative AI and science fiction? How do you see the, what do you see as the meld of the future now with all these all these moving parts now as it’s morphing into the next decade?

Owen Cotter (51:03): I think the morphing grid of AI and technology would have to be, first off, you got to look at it as like people lean on it, there’s tools that use it. So for writers, I honestly like original storytelling with writers write up by hand or by typewriter, or by keyboard. Yeah, without leaning heavily on Chat GPT. Art wise, it’s amalgamated, especially pulling from Google images and just combining together. Although AI could be used, it is being used for productive things like solving cures to diseases, implementing things that can be used for original like render… A lot of things now are replacing green screen to a degree with OLED volumes and some of my buddies have experimented with things such as next generation, fourth generation mocap (motion capture) film making which takes mocap fourth gen VR to another level which Mocap is the old technology put the dots and the more stuff like Gollum from Lord of the Rings and stuff like that fourth generation mocap and I’m not the expert on this.

Owen Cotter (52:02): One of the gentlemen at the innovation portal, Nathaniel would be the wizard on that. What you do is you can do two things like he has a project, very interesting. And they’ve done some things with overlay and deep fake renders for like, Rogue One and Star Wars and all that. And we had Engel Dyla, there was the episode, obviously Rogue One stand in for Princess Leia for Rogue. But this is a whole other level. He was able to in 4th gen rendering AI resurrect using Ernest Borgnein’s son with the authorization from the estate.

Resurrecting Ernest Borgnein for a video game and original sci-fi. I don’t think it’s been released yet, but it’s known. So he was able to resurrect and I watched the way. Wait, I thought he died. I mean it for Black Hole and all the movies, from Air Wolf. They resurrected him in this very tasteful character with his son doing the mannerisms and all that with the fourth generation mocap. And all this may be the future to a degree, not just with renderings of people, but the environments that you build like practical sets like Mandalorian that’s practical.

But we’ve experimented with these big OLED volumes they use. So they’ll have like a practical set, you have a character standing on a spaceship and they can make them look like they’re in a desert with the original film footage, but they’re an OLED volumes. You couple that with this mocap. If you want to bring back a character like, like whoever, like Ernest Borgnein, they can, if given authorization, I believe it has to be given authorization tastefully by either the estate or the family.

And you can bring, like his son doing the management of his father was very intriguing. I thought that was intriguing. So there’s a whole other technology of optical revolution.

John Goodwin (53:38): Is that how they did Princess Leia in the last Star Wars movie?

Owen Cotter (53:42): That was done more with, more like not so much AI, but with deepfake original images. They have a whole database, like for Harrison Ford, when they did the last Indiana Jones, they have his likeness at different angles, which they can deepfake and de-age him. It’s called de-aging process, but that’s his actual voice. He did the recording of his actual voice for the film and that’s de-aging. But this mocap for generation AI, that’s a whole other level. You could take somebody like an actor like me, put in voice, their voice and everything. When they mocap, make them even another character like an alien or features, but their voice mannerisms on whatever it is. So it’s fourth generation mocap. Like it’s the feature. I imagine, the guy that does Gollum doing Gollum, but not with the dots, but fourth generation mocap. And you can put it into VR and head glasses too. It’s a whole other thing too. So it’s a game and the movie on VR. So he actually, the gentleman I mentioned specializes in VR experience has one of only haptic full-blown VR in the country. I’ve been in the full haptic you put the glasses on It’s like a real-life holodeck. You can feel the wind the floor moving and it’s all you’re all in virtual. I got inside a thing this big time portal opens and there’s an 80 story Brontosaurus in front of me and you can feel the floor bouncing and vibrating. You get inside a virtual elevator, you go down, you’re in a carnival. You’re throwing darts in VR look right you can see your friends in VR. Hold the trophy in VR and then you’re out of the whole program. He’s got like a dozen of those things and the pirate ship you can escape from and spaceships and anything and everything.

John Goodwin (55:16): Yeah, that’s definitely science fiction and it’s really cool.

Owen Cotter (55:20): Could be used for positive. Dangerous aspects as well, like Terminator and all that.

John Goodwin (55:24): Yeah, well I mean I’m even the point of like we’ve got a society that’s getting more and more out of communication with each other. And so you see now the Gen Z and Gen A that they’re sitting in…

Owen Cotter (55:39): The disconnect, the disconnect from reality to the digital verse. We just created a new section on sci fiction called Artificial Intelligence for this reason. We may be going to an Artificial Intelligence Expo in Las Vegas before STLV to check that out, kind of interview some of the people and get more of a grasp on what, I don’t know a lot about it. I know a little bit about it, but I kind of get a grasp on what that is and where the future lies and what if for that. And we’ve got some interesting artists that have come out. One’s like the second brain about AI and ones about AI tools being used for like from resumes to anything and everything. There’s some very interesting stuff we’ve got coming. We got another 20 articles about them coming out the next month from that.

John Goodwin (56:19): Wow, that’s amazing. There’s so much stuff to talk about and stuff and I would definitely love to continue this discussion at a later point to do more of this stuff because this is just fascinating. Yeah, and something people need to have some better understanding on in order to be able to know how to properly navigate it. Because it can it can also be a trap. Very complicated, but it’s like you can get totally stuck into it and forget you’ve got real people around you.

Owen Cotter (56:48): Rabbit hole into the matrix and beyond and into the triangle.

John Goodwin (56:51): It is totally a rabbit hole in the matrix. So anyway, we’ve come to the end of our hour here, which has been, it went really fast. I only had a few questions knowing that once we started talking about it, it would just immediately descend ourselves into questions that were gonna pop up there. So anyway, I appreciate this very much.

Owen Cotter (57:14): Appreciate you, for having me on the show.

John Goodwin (57:16): And thank you for listening. Subscribe to the Writers of the Future Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve also been syndicated on the United Public Radio Network where you can find these podcasts as well. The Writers and Illustrators of the Future are contests created by L. Ron Hubbard to provide a means for the aspiring writer and artist to be seen and acknowledged for over four decades. It is free to enter and open to amateur short story writers and artists of science fiction or fantasy. Again, thank you very much, Owen.

Owen Cotter (57:42): Thank you sir, you have a beautiful day, John.